The Singles Jukebox

Speaking of timelessness, it’s still Grammy time for us, so let’s catch up with another beneficiary of the show.

[Video]
[4.69]

Jackie Powell: The irony of this track begins with its name. The adjective “timeless” refers to something that doesn’t age poorly and that doesn’t seem to have an end; its relevance and to a degree greatness is everlasting. That’s all quite paradoxical when put in the context of “Timeless,” the lead single from Abel Tesfaye’s latest and final album as The Weeknd. While Tesfaye might be saying on this track that he and his six-album body of work are timeless, the track itself isn’t very memorable, reminiscent of the redundant trap hip-hop of the 2010s. Neither was his performance of it at this year’s Grammys. When reflecting on Tesfaye’s career as The Weeknd, this collaboration won’t be even close to what he’ll be remembered for. Is that his point? I’m not sure. Maybe The Weeknd’s grand finale isn’t incumbent on the critical or mainstream success of this project’s lead single. Do lead singles even matter in 2025?
[4]

Ian Mathers: So what, “Dancing in the Flames” (which, sorry, was good) fails to go top ten, gets dropped from the album, and instead for a lead single we get a few minutes of aimless-feeling Carti and The Weeknd muttering “ever since I was young, I been legit”? What a downgrade.
[4]

Alfred Soto: The Weeknd’s latest album has a lustrous sheen: it gleams. Self-piteous confessionals have rarely sounded this immaculate. A jester who takes his tasks seriously, Playboi Carti might’ve worked as a complement to the lachrymosity, but he beams in from a star in a distant galaxy.
[5]

Leah Isobel: Generally, I find The Weeknd’s music dour and joyless. It might use pop form and pop sound, but the point is to express an isolated sourness in direct opposition to the communal awe and wonder that pop should articulate. (Though I guess I’m in the minority on that opinion.) “Timeless,” however, actually works for me, partly because I’m a sucker for these trance bleep-bloops. But here, I think it’s more about the space between them, the way the sounds just bounce around in the abyss; the darkness is a legible part of the soundscape, rather than being grafted on in lyrics or videos or performances. This frees up Mr. Weeknd to just radiate charisma, pulsing waves of blue light within the void. I imagine that pop stardom completely strips away any illusions a person might have about society being just or fair; at a certain level of fame, you get irrevocably over-familiar with the utter meaninglessness of the systems of celebrity and power. The song articulates this. It indicates a surrender of one’s interior darkness, a dissolution into a greater understanding that we are all just totally fucked, trading the gothic for the cosmic.
[7]

Katherine St. Asaph: He isn’t wrong about being timeless: this is the schtick of House of Balloons from 2011, plus edginess from 2005 Internet fora (“if I was you, I would cut up my wrist” USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST), plus a trap beat over what could be an instrumental from mp3.com in 2000.
[6]

Al Varela: The blooping beat that chugs alongside a sterile trap snare, rarely budging from its steady 120 BPM tempo, makes for a boring trap banger that doesn’t even bother to do anything with its Mike Dean synth swells. Playboi Carti channels his most boring, safe, anonymous mode, and the Weeknd doesn’t fare much better. His high-pitched, smooth croon doesn’t fit the middling atmosphere, and none of his dark and seductive hedonism comes through; he just sounds bored talking about the girls he fucks and the success he’s gotten. Those are both things that The Weeknd has excelled at in his music, including on the album this was eventually put on! I don’t know when the general public developed such bad taste in Weeknd songs, but it’s not like they came to “Timeless” for him anyway.
[3]

Mark Sinker: My Weeknd theory — as in, how tf does he have the most listens of any artist in history? (Citation: claim made by the bots on Google, above what yr actually looking for.) He’s broken through to the most effective version of the generative ambient music that Eno long dreamt of (and now panics about lol). Weeknd listens are the long loops people set in place when they need to focus-work without interruption. No, but there’s more: what if Weeknd listens are the long loops that AI learning bots set in place when they need to SLOP without interruption? On the upside, the backing is kind of soothingly pretty, no lie. Downside? World mouth-of-marbles champ Carti filtered down to essence-of-shoegaze earfloss.
[5]

Melody Esme: Inspiring Genius annotation: “While Playboi Carti has a history of physically assaulting women, in this line ‘hit’ is slang for having sex.” Hmm.
[4]

Andrew Karpan: “Who even is that guy?” my partner asked me when Playboi Carti suddenly appeared on stage at the Grammys, shortly after Harvey Mason Jr. played a montage of news clips aggregating stories about The Weeknd’s promise to never play the awards show again. Well, there he was, a grand avatar of nothing, struggling to reheat a single he put out months ago and largely failing to introduce Mr. Carti to the millions of gathered fans of “Not Like Us.” Even the way the pair trade bars on this record is depressing, a kind of empty chanting that fills up space. 
[4]

Julian Axelrod: Doechii’s immaculate Grammys showcase wasn’t just devastating for the Bensons and Teddys in her immediate vicinity; its shockwaves rippled all the way out to rattle Playboi Carti’s lifeless appearance during the Weeknd’s grand return to the awards show stage. I’m the last guy you’ll hear argue that a bars-forward classicist live performer is inherently superior to a shy guy crooning about his jeans over an itchy synth line. (I spent most of 2024 banging the drum for Carti’s feature on “I LUV IT,” a true star turn on a genuinely challenging collab.) But it’s hard to watch the two sets back to back and not consider that Carti, a stadium performer (?) whose stage presence is 60% jacket, has appeared multiple times on both the Grammys and SNL with the energy of a teenager being dragged out of his room to meet his parents’ friends’ kids. It speaks to the mainstreaming of two artists who at one point had a convincing air of danger and mystery, but now clock into separate halves of an ambient Pharrell/Mike Dean beat like coworkers in adjoining cubicles.
[5]

Nortey Dowuona: Hey, so now that The Weeknd is dead can we get the Amharic album? And can she be on it?
[6]

Jel Bugle: Just a big heap of nothing, an autotune blob. Even the usually effervescent Carti can’t save this one. Imagine listening to the whole album!
[3]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: So boring that it becomes compelling again — this is the closest thing I can imagine to the cosmic background radiation of streaming-era pop, a luxuriously sterile collaboration between two formerly avant-garde megastars that possesses all the chemistry of a corporate merger. The synths are expensive enough that my brain wants this to be good; my heart can’t do it.
[5]

no blergs » Monday, February 10th, 2025 9:51 pm

You know, it’s been a little minute since we have had a chat. We’ve been getting some calls….

[Video]
[8.24]

Nortey Dowuona: One of the fun parts of becoming a Doechii fan has been watching her slowly control the planet through the power of her performances. Doechii, unlike many newly christened rap ladies, has smartly found a massive lane wide open. IanJames, Joey Hamhock and Banser make a simple organ stab over simple soft-focus drums that sounds enough like elder rap of the late ’90s (which needs a more compelling and lively avatar than the now-legendary Rapsody, who is now certified, stamped, and decamped to the Apple Music Zane Lowe publicity machine). Doechii, a multi-dimensional rapper, easily fills this with a silly, De La Soul-type rap about her rising success that treats the darker parts of that rise as blithe jokes, some of which hit (“whoopsy, made an oopsy”) and some of which don’t (that little ramble about being on the white horse). In lesser hands this would easily crumple into a flimsy Joyner Lucas parody, but Doechii has the charisma, humor and sincerity to make all these simple, straightforward pieces unlock the doors that “What It Is” or “Booty Drop” could not. I wish her good luck in taking over the world, a success that I know will only be thwarted by behind-the-scenes shenanigans. If Moosa does Doechii like he did Jimi Tents and Reason, I will —
[10]

Melody Esme: A major highlight from 2024’s greatest hip-hop record, this would be stellar in concept alone: an “I’m back, bitch” single (credit for the term: Todd in the Shadows) in the form of a trauma-dump rather than a boast. Doechii tells the story of the years since she first blew up in the form of a heavy, TMI therapy session, complete with cheating, burnout, drug use, and property damage. Imagine if Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers was funny and, crucially, fun. On the best moment of the song, and possibly the entire mixtape, she goes on the defensive: “I like pills, I like drugs/I like gettin’ money, I like strippers, I like to fuck/I like day-drinking and day parties and Hollywood/I like doin’ Hollywood shit, snort it, probably would/What can I say? The shit works, it feels good/And my self-worth’s at an all-time low.” As a gal whose only plan for the future is becoming gayer and more unhinged, I feel those bars in my soul. All that said, she really should have known how the “girl was really a dude” line would read without context. But she gets a pass… this time.
[9]

Alex Clifton: Personal and raw but also extremely funny — tell me you didn’t laugh the first time you heard the breathing exercise at the end. I’m chronically incapable of confronting bad stuff with anything other than bad puns, but Doechii doesn’t just crack jokes here; she weaves an entire story complete with a therapist character and somehow manages to do it all under three minutes. Fuckin’ slaps.
[8]

Andrew Karpan: Gliding through a Rocky montage of hit records and emotional betrayals, Doechii’s voice has a reflexive snappiness, a generational avatar for going through it. The way the breathing exercise at the end explodes into a Nicki Minaj impersonation is illuminating. As is the version of the song Doechii does with Issa Rae, who impersonates Doechii’s alter-ego therapist so well that I can’t listen to the song anymore without seeing it, which is a plus.
[8]

Daniel Monteshenko: A really interesting technical storytelling performance, but God it goes over my head to want to hear this more than once. BONUS: the hyperventilating is now, like all things, a TikTok dance trend! (TikTok also goes over my head.)
[5]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: This is some whimsical bullshit. I’d hate it if I weren’t already embarrassingly in the tank for Doechii, but the fact that this works at all is testament to her extreme charisma. Any old schmuck can make thrilling fast raps or grimy dance raps, but to take a half-baked cornball theater kid routine and turn it into a sharp, genuinely funny single takes real talent. It’s not perfect — the “whoopsy” bit makes me roll my eyes every time she does it — but each thrill and bauble here is compelling enough to justify the whole. 
[8]

Claire Davidson: Doechii is so obviously talented that I hardly even need to mention how impressive her performance is here. As of writing this blurb, she has just become only the third woman to win the Grammy for Best Rap Album, a (depressing) mantle of which she is more than worthy: her surplus charisma allows her to navigate frustration, bravado, and self-conscious deflection without missing a step. Her technical precision can’t be overstated, either, as she nimbly dances over a beat that both accentuates her triumphant stride and serves as its own ironic joke when contrasted with her eventually bleaker stories. As drastically and successfully as “Denial is a River” swings across tones, though, I do wish that the song had more of a deeper revelation to punctuate her struggles, rather than the funny but gimmicky “breathing exercise” that concludes the song. Also, while I do understand that this song is framed as a tell-all therapy session, and that the lyrics are more judgmental of this guy’s dishonesty than his sexuality, Doechii’s choice to make a dispirited punchline out of her ex cheating on her with another man strikes me as a bit tasteless. That Doechii is openly queer, and seems to have no problem with dating bisexual men in real life, only makes this decision more puzzling.
[7]

Hannah Jocelyn: She could have worded that one bar better about the guy cheating on her with another man — I wrote this song off as transphobic at first! Otherwise, this is nearly perfect. I almost wonder whether a Missy Elliot comparison is too obvious, but they’re both highly theatrical, which I prefer over the more deliberately effortless rap we’ve been getting for the last few years. But “Denial is a River” gets a high score for one reason: her delivery of soup beans, which makes me want to make an edit where every line is replaced with soup beans. (“Soup beans, made a soup beans/100, 000-dollar soups made me soup beans.”) Maybe I’d give this a [10] if it turned out the dude was cheating on her with bean sprouts.
[8]

Jel Bugle: A good introduction/narrative song — reminds me of Millie Jackson. I enjoyed the squeaky voice of the interviewer, and the back and forth. Good to hear quirk making its way into modern songs.
[7]

Al Varela: I really love music where it feels like one or two rappers are just having a conversation. Framing this single around a therapy session where Doechii recaps her career and all the ways her past comes back to bite her makes for some of the most engaging storytelling I’ve heard in rap in a while, especially from someone mainstream enough to have charting hits. From the way Doechii abruptly admits her life is pretty bad after bragging about all her achievements, to the friendly banter between Doechii and her therapist that ends in a bizarre breathing exercise, the story is just genuinely funny.
[9]

Mark Sinker: There should of course be a Grammy just for best looped grunting and gasping in a song — every single year they could have different half-recognised comedians snatching it away from Fontaines DC. Meanwhile, in back of a long melancholy Lynch binge, I’m hearing versions of his moves everywhere: like giving your therapist a cartoon chipmunk voice to drug deeper into your chaotic emotional state (or how you choose to present it, I guess). Make us stop short before an ancient super-corny pop-cultural device, and that’s maybe where the clarity we don’t want to process can slip through the over-ignored surface. Because out here at the surviving Weird Twitter wing of pop, realism is often a consequence of the serenely bludged processing we blink at a little. 
[9]

Katherine St. Asaph: I am slightly worried about the number of times I have broken into “I mean, fuck, I like pills, I like drugs, I like getting money, I like strippers, I like to fuck…”, and in the spirit of this song I will not introspect on that any further.
[9]

Taylor Alatorre: 2023 is a foreign country, 23 hours ago an unbridgeable chasm. Why can’t my arms reach back in time and jerk my head around to prevent me from entering that room, or applying for that loan, or avoiding that funeral, when the long-armed consequences of those past decisions can be seen and felt and rhymed about in the graceless present? Why is Doechii able to make “whoopsie, made an oopsie” sound as hard as anything coming out of Griselda Records?
[10]

Leah Isobel: As finely crafted as “Denial is a River” is, that first verse still makes me cringe (even as Doechii has gone on record to clarify her meaning). It’s an imprecise bit of storytelling in a song that is otherwise razor-sharp, slowly breaking itself down until even the rhythms are knives pointed back at its performer.
[7]

Alfred Soto: If Eminem still needs a reminder of how to voice characters in song, he might give “Denial is a River” a listen. Not the best track on the “mixtape,” but one of the few that encapsulates her powers.
[8]

Julian Axelrod: I never expected this conversational self-interrogating one-act play to become Doechii’s signature song from an album bursting at the seams with potential pop smashes. Then again, there are a lot of things about Doechii that we didn’t see coming. It’s been a minute since a rapper with this much casual virtuosity and clarity of vision has had this kind of momentum, and she’s not wasting any of it. Do you know how talented you have to be to take what’s essentially an Eminem song concept and make it this good?
[9]

Ian Mathers: Funny in a harrowing kind of way, and vice versa. It is in fact a talent to take almost three minutes of exposition and make it this compelling.
[9]

no blergs » Monday, February 10th, 2025 4:18 pm

Rounding out our 2024 catch-up is this #1 hit that is now our #1 hit (so far)…

[Video]
[8.30]

Melody Esme: Obviously, “Not Like Us” was Kendrick’s song of 2024 (and, consensus-wise, maybe the song of the year, full-stop, though it’ll have to fight “Good Luck, Babe!” for the title). But with its brilliant sample of the fourth greatest freestyle song ever, the “I feel good, get the fuck out my f-a-a-ace” hook, and no cultural context needed to get it beyond hip-hop’s history of braggadocious jams, “Squabble Up” may prove more enduring down the road. His most immediate, purely catchy single since “King Kunta.”
[9]

Katherine St. Asaph: At first I thought the “When I Hear Music” sample was gimmicky J. R. Rotem shit and a weird attention grab by Kendrick Lamar — who, after “Not Like Us,” has earned more automatic attention than many artists ever do. But it’s cool how Sounwave and Jack Antonoff (still unfairly maligned, do not @ me) completely transmute its genre and timbre. Feels like Kendrick’s coasting, but people said that about “Not Like Us” too. 
[8]

Ian Mathers: Do you think Kendrick is going to start getting people yelling “Not Like Us” at his shows, “Free Bird” style? Do you think if he does, they’ll get their asses beat?
[9]

Julian Axelrod: An incomplete list of words and phrases from this song that I will eternally hear in Kendrick’s nasally tone: broccoli, hydrated, deluxe, bunk skunk, thunk thunk thunk, and of course, “squabble up,” ten beautifully arranged letters that should replace the Hollywood sign. On an album where Kendrick pays extensive tribute (stylistically, if not explicitly) to the late, great Drakeo the Ruler, this song best captures his predecessor’s gift for saying words you’ve never heard in a way you’ll never forget. After a decade of touting himself as the voice of a generation, it’s fun to hear Kendrick test the limits of his generational voice.
[8]

Taylor Alatorre: He probably should run for mayor when he’s done, to be honest, because “Squabble Up” is a masterclass in political pivoting. For those who still haven’t gotten all the Drake slander out of their system, there’s enough thickly veiled shade here to satisfy, and the instant “victory lap” consensus is not an incorrect one. But to the extent that the disses exist, they’re knotted in such Gordian forms that, even when untangled, a plausible deniability is maintained: is this really anti-Aubrey sentiment, or just your everyday hater-stomping? The floor-filling sample seems to nudge toward the latter, and the type of close listening that’s most being rewarded here isn’t the lyrical kind; it’s the kind that takes pleasure in tracing out the sonic signature of a charmed cultural moment, specifically the year when Lil Jon became E-40’s main producer. The hype train must be kept a-rollin’, and to that end, Mr. Morale must be politely shoved aside, with “Mr. Get Off” allowed to take his place. Kendrick is wise to juggle the competing expectations of a bifurcated audience, and even more so to realize that the most transferrable element of “Not Like Us” is its aural pantomiming of street justice. Try as you might, there is no rebuttal to thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk.
[8]

Aaron Bergstrom: Sometimes an irritant just becomes a part of your environment. Maybe it’s a persistent noise or an unpleasant smell. You live with it every day. You get used to it to the point where it doesn’t even register anymore. Then, one day, it’s gone. You feel an incredible lightness, like a weight has been lifted from your subconscious. You’re free. How did you ever live like that for so long? Anyway, that’s what it feels like to finally hear a Kendrick Lamar song that isn’t about Drake. 
[9]

Leah Isobel: Feels like a loaded time to say that I’m not really a Kendrick girlie, but here we are. I don’t dislike him — he’s quite talented! — but I tend to prefer artists with more cartoonish and unpredictable personae. (I remain, after all these years, an Azealia Banks stan. Do not fucking @ me.) Conversely, even Kendrick’s most fantastical material tends to orbit around relatively predictable markers of seriousness and skill. Like here, for instance. I love his drunk-singalong delivery of the hook, I love that “thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk” bit, and I love the Debbie Deb sample. But the production is too mannered and clean, too obvious in its references, and while Kendrick’s deployment of different vocal levels and styles is impressive, it also feels a little bit more like a highlight reel than a choice made with this specific song in mind. I imagine there are more eyes and ears on him now than in years past, more listeners and fans expecting him to further delineate the contrast between the serious hip-hop that his image has come to epitomize and the unserious, morally bankrupt, culture-vulture pop shit that The Other Guy made his name on. It might not appeal to my tastes, but I don’t blame Kendrick for complying.
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I’ve always thought Kendrick was, counter to popular conception, a better singles artist than album artist (case in point: the thrill of “The Heart Pt. 5” vs the tedium of Mr. Morale). On GNX, he splits the difference — it’s an album that sheds the rich conceptual heft of his prior records for a slightly elevated take on untitled unmastered., a wiry collection of endlessly compelling sketches and hooks. “Squabble Up” is not my favorite song from that album (I prefer the gloriously bassy “Dodger Blue,” and not just for its half-decade-on Roddy Ricch revivalism), but it’s a perfect illustration of why GNX works; it’s a dense, insular song, flooding the zone with catchy fragments and vocal tics. Over a canvas of ’80s electro nostalgia, Lamar sounds almost smug in his victory lap boasts; it’d be frustratingly egotistic if he wasn’t such a compelling impressionist; leaving aside his skills as a lyricist, he can mine a wealth of feeling just out of saying “squabble up” in different intonations.
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: Kendrick caught in that strobe-lit hallway, rapping about being reincarnated over hyperventilation desperate enough to be the aspiration of predator as to be prey. When “Squabble Up” appeared in full form on GNX, four-and-a-half months after it was teased in the “Not Like Us” video, it transformed from claustrophobic heater to something expansive enough to reach deeper into history than it does into physical space. The Debbie Deb sample leavens the beat — freestyle’s sweetness can’t help but do that — but Sounwave’s production (with, intriguingly, an assist from Jack Antonoff) draws on Los Angeles’s ancient connection to the electro sound: Egyptian Lover and the World Class Wreckin’ Cru live on in Lamar’s 2024. It’s Kendrick’s ideology in musical form, and the case he pressed against bête noire Drake for the entirety of last year: that hip-hop is cultural expression constructed from granular specifics. It’s built from specific places, specific histories, specific communities, and their specific histories and shared historiographies. Tell me why you rap if it’s fictional, he asks, and that might be an attempt to out-real the competition, but it’s also a demand not to allow this music to become deracinated and dislocated. He draws from hyphy here too — the “I’m finna go dumb” call-and-response in the bridge — and that’s a favorite creative font for Drake too; Kendrick, maybe, is underlining that as a Californian he shares this Bay Area heritage in a way his adversary doesn’t; that Oakland show won’t be Kendrick’s last stop. “Squabble” is a great word, petty and picayune, but expressed in a rush of sibilants and plosives. These are sounds for Kendrick to grasp and play with, and he extends that craft through his verses. “Yee-haw, we outside,” he drawls in sardonic character. “Get the fuck out my face,” as the hook possesses a rude vibrato. “Broadie,” “broccoli,” “couldn’t try me in the tri-state” are run out too. But “Squabble Up” isn’t just a freestyler showing off; the verbiage is there for the same reason the expansive production is. Kendrick wants rap to say something, but he knows that how it says it matters just as much.
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: Bless this man. He made this, this, and this. Maybe Kendrick Lamar / Matana Roberts / Scott Bridgeway collab album? (Stop clowning him for his bonnet, Kendrick. His hair looks better than yours.)
[10]

3 blergs » Sunday, January 19th, 2025 7:41 pm

And our last reader pick from Juan Carlos: smoky indie with an unfortunately timely title (for real, though, we hope all of you in Southern California are safe)…

[Video]
[7.57]

Katherine St. Asaph: Maybe it’s current events that are making me hear an ominous undertone in this love song (which is silly because “Fire Excape” isn’t mythologizing LA; it’s mythologizing Brooklyn, in a way I can’t explain but is unmistakable who listened to indie-pop around 2013). Or maybe it’s the last vestiges of a pessimism I don’t use anymore. But that vibe does fill out the almost-too-spare arrangement, and makes the metallic, knifelike vocal production on Zsela’s “going down” cut more sharply.
[7]

Julian Axelrod: I can’t get enough of Zsela’s voice, which exists somewhere in the neighborhood of ANOHNI and Nilüfer Yanya but belongs to its own zip code. There’s something so powerful about a singer who always sounds like they’re about to break into a Broadway-level belt, but chooses to pull back from the brink. Whenever those synths drop in, it feels as dramatic as a final curtain call.
[8]

Leah Isobel: The soft-loud trick at the heart of “Fire Excape” is one of Zsela’s blunter tactics, and I’m not sure that it benefits from being so obvious. But it also exemplifies what I like so much about her music: it expands outward from a plain realization, articulating how it feels to know your life has permanently changed without knowing how or why or whether you will survive it. The landscape, the song-form, warps around you.
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: SCHAFER: “I guess that’s why a lot of musicians blow my mind. When I listen to a song or try to make music, which has been a disaster, the only way I can think about it is to see it. Or, I see what it would look like and then I try to figure out what that sounds like.” ZSELA: “But you paint and stuff. That comes into play when you’re thinking about music, too. Sometimes I think in colors with music, but I’m not so visual. I’m very insecure about any sort of drawing and painting. I went to an alternative school, and we did a lot of our learning through art. You had to draw your textbooks, things like that. It had to be perfect, so that was a little school trauma of mine.” The drums here are wild. Gabe Wax, was that you?
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: Zsela lacks the presence to stand out in this arrangement: she sings prettily enough but is overwhelmed by thunking bass chunks and flash-lit radiation blasts of synth. In the face of such force, she’s inessential on her own song. “When day breaks on the fire escape I’m falling in love,” is a striking moment, and notably it occurs when the music drops out and Zsela sings it a cappella.
[6]

Melody Esme: Zsela’s soulful vocals combined with a minimalist alt-pop instrumental that slowly intensifies into something casually, smoothly orchestral, this gave me a taste of early Nilüfer Yanya singles like “Baby Luv” and “Golden Cage” more than anything Yanya has released since 2018. But no Yanya record has featured something as chaotic as the little fuzz-synth sting in this song’s chorus.
[8]

Ian Mathers: Genuinely, more artpop should have blasts of noise like this, or a vocal performance this good and varied, or a moment that hits as hard as “I get along quite fine, thank you.”
[9]

1 blerg » Friday, January 17th, 2025 11:33 pm

Rounding out our readers’ picks is a choice from Joey that has Eric Clapton catching strays…

[Video]
[7.07]

Julian Axelrod: At this point, MJ Lenderman has been compared to every hyper-literate (male) songwriter and novelist under the sun. But at his best, he operates like a road-trained stand-up comic: Every town has a dive bar, every punchline has been sharpened until it draws blood, and every joke at his expense has already been made by him. Are you sick of indie guitar bros cosplaying as classic rock gods? MJ’s got a burn for the Eric Clapton stan in your life. Not into tales of Southern shitheads drowning in their own machismo? Here’s a tight five on why Vegas sucks. Worried this guy’s too irony-pilled for his own good? Enjoy this honest-to-god gorgeous shout-along chorus that would have ruled college radio if that still existed when Lenderman was born. The real kicker comes on the outro, where his ex-girlfriend/Wednesday bandmate Karly Hartzman croons the titular refrain like a drunken lullaby as our hero shreds into the void. Remember to tip your waitstaff.
[8]

Melody Esme: Yeah, I don’t get it. I didn’t really get Wednesday’s album either, but at least it had the masterpiece “Chosen to Deserve,” plus a lead singer with a mode beyond Guero-era Beck. All Lenderman has to offer is “Wristwatch”‘s “I’ve got a houseboat docked at the Himbo Dome,” one of the funniest and most compelling poetic visuals in 2024 pop music, and one that encouraged me to give Manning Fireworks more chances than I should have. And despite all the times I played it, I still had to refresh my memory on what this track even sounded like — a bad sign, considering it was the single. I like that he disses Clapton, though.
[4]

Taylor Alatorre: “You’ve opened the Bible to the very first page,” says Lenderman on the album’s title track. This is meant as a dig at fundie sanctimony, but it could double as a description of Manning Fireworks as a whole, and its tendency to reach for the nearest available reference point at all times, lyrically and musically. Guitar Hero, Cars 3, the first band that pops into your head when you read the term “alt-country,” it’s all there. This reads like a defect, but it isn’t necessarily. It’s called a comfort zone for a reason, and if the artist is able to credibly embody that sense of comfort and radiate it toward the listener, then all is well. “She’s Leaving You” is a standout example of this kind of productive complacency, even if its brand of good-guy realism makes Lenderman sound like Ben Kweller’s more successful roommate, who tells everyone he meets about how therapy changed him. Solid advice, though I’m still going with Sha Sha if given a choice.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: I suppose 30-year-old David Berman pastiche isn’t too out of date when you’re making 50-year-old Eric Clapton disses. (Please, the midlife crises of 2025 are soundtracked by Nirvana. Maybe I’m being mean because my midlife crisis could also be soundtracked by Nirvana.)
[6]

Alfred Soto: I heard nothing special in this scenester’s voice at first: one more guitar-wielding wordsmith for whom the whine is wine. The crunch compensated for the occasional howlers. But as the morning after Election Day dawned, “It falls apart/we all got work to do” sounded prophetic. Even guitar-wielding wordsmiths must have soul.
[7]

Grace Robins-Somerville: I wasn’t as crazy about this song as everyone else was when it first dropped, but it’s grown on me and it really does feel like a classic. I wanna put it on the jukebox at a shitty dive bar and I want an entire room full of alcoholic middle aged men singing along as they drink what should be their child support payments. 
[9]

Nortey Dowuona: My love of music, my hairline or my willingness to commit to self improvement? I gotta pick a metaphor, man!
[10]

Will Adams: Last year I fell into a hole of watching the show Daria from start to finish, and then rewatching certain episodes that I particularly loved over and over again. I had seen some of it growing up, when I was probably too young to understand the humor, much less its worldview. Watching it now is illuminating; I see that nearly 30 years ago, there were also kids who surveyed the landscape and shrugged at their inability to fit in. “She’s Leaving You” sounds like something that could’ve played during one of the commercial bumpers (once filled with pop songs, now featuring stock music due to licensing shenanigans): angsty while disaffected, assertive while self-effacing. The chorus’ call of “we all got work to do” doubles as a sincere motivational mantra and a fortune cookie. MJ Lenderman’s weary delivery sells it and lets the guitar solo do the talking.
[8]

Ian Mathers: I mean, it is nice to hear the slack, vaguely folky/countrified (or maybe just post-Neil Young) indie rock of my youth coming back into style even if it was never particularly my thing. I found myslf resisting the density of praise around Lenderman pretty much because I remember when this stuff was a dime a dozen, but that just means I’m on the other side of the divide than I used to be. Overhyped or not, Lenderman’s not to blame, and this is just a pretty solid song.
[8]

Iain Mew: A song this plaintive and classicist puts a lot of emphasis onto the words. The man with a rented Ferrari worshipping Eric Clapton is such a hoary stereotype it’s of age for its own midlife crisis, and as a result those lines barely feel cutting at all. The song improves from there but never loses the sense of settling for the easiest of targets.
[4]

Claire Davidson: I don’t mind deadpan breakup songs, provided the affect is used with intent, like a narrator poking fun at the self-pity they would typically indulge. Yet MJ Lenderman’s delivery here doesn’t seem self-deprecating so much as half-asleep or stoned, to the point that an otherwise endearing mix of saturated guitars simply sounds out of place in matching his sedated approach. What’s worse is that Lenderman’s lack of vitality only further draws attention to his languid lyrics, which are fine enough in capturing his subject’s dejection, but curiously withholding in describing the titular woman’s departure. The only clue to her exit is, perhaps, the subject’s propensity to idolize Eric Clapton, a reference so on-the-nose in its implied arrogance that I can’t even commend the attempt at wit.
[5]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: MJ Lenderman’s appeal, such as it is, is in his status as a classic dumb guy bard — the absurdist ripsote to Zach Bryan’s post-ironic classic rock worship (for those keeping track, Father John Misty is the ironic take.) When he sings on “Hangover Game” that he bought fake Jordans that “weren’t even shoes” or when he says on “Wristwatch” that he’s “got a houseboat parked at the himbo dome” I do not know quite what he is talking about in a literal sense but I know what he means — a level of ridiculous, laughable debasement that we all have touched at one point in our lives or another, feeling like a cat who has managed to get stuck in a wall or atop a refrigerator. This is a fine position for an artist to occupy, but it’s also a tenuous one; you can only play the sad clown for so long. “She’s Leaving You” is where I run out of time for Lenderman’s schtick; he’s running the Neil Young with jokes playbook without the jokes, a shaggy set of riffs with a great absence at the center. 
[5]

Katherine St. Asaph: Today is my birthday, so naturally I’m thinking about the new year before me. Specifically: Is this the year I enter my dad-rock era?
[8]

Aaron Bergstrom: Every song on Manning Fireworks presents a protagonist more pitiful than the last, a collection of broken men staggering through life, sneakin’ backstage to hound the girls in the circus, passed out in their Lucky Charms and searching in vain for an eternal Himbo Dome of the soul. “She’s Leaving You,” the album’s literal and figurative centerpiece, is the only song that even gestures at finding any common ground with these cautionary tales, in the process creating a kind of shambolic anthem. Sure, you might not currently be in the midst of an especially unimaginative midlife crisis. You might not be so far gone that you’re talking yourself into the genius of, yikes, Eric Clapton. And yet, wherever you are, it’s always true that it falls apart, we’ve all got work to do. Who’s feeling lucky?
[10]

no blergs » Friday, January 17th, 2025 7:00 am

And with Han Li, we blast off into the recent past…

[Video]
[6.45]

Han Li: After their wildly inventive run on NEXTGIRLZ last year, I was worried babyMINT had lost their spark. Their debut single sounded rote and well… boring. But then they released “BB Gals of the Galaxy”, a song which saw them back on their bullshit (complimentary). It leans into their weirdness, swerving from idea to idea. There are so many pieces of ear candy: the aborted intro by Siena they kept in, the infantile simplicity of the synths during the “laser gun BUI BUI” chorus, the bits where they repeat phrases like a record skipping, the cascading notes sprinkled throughout the pre-chorus. Most of all, it makes me feel the carefree innocence of being young. A time when everything felt easy and all your ideas worked. When you could screw up the intro but things still fell perfectly into place.
[8]

Iain Mew: Releasing in between the thrillingly harnessed chaos of “Booooooring” and “\ Lucy!!!!!! /”, this was comparatively underwhelming on release. Babymint’s kind-of-debut-album at the end of 2023 demonstrated a foundation of more conventional musical appeal beyond the meme and gabba stuff, though, and in context of their since-released EP “BB Gals of the Galaxy” works something like the most similar “Grab Me If U Can!!” from that album. Light, stylish pop with just enough biu-biu laser noises and vacuum synth sounds for a flavour of something beyond.
[7]

Katherine St. Asaph: Despite never owning a Bratz doll, I am an avowed fan of the Bratz music franchise. What I like is how the albums (for whatever value of “albums”) round up session songwriters to produce more accurate and often better pastiches of McBling pop hits than the years-removed homages of Rina or Charli or Tate McRae. (Sorry, I just can’t do the mononym yet.) Honestly, they embody the sound of their year more than the real hits do. And this could be Bratz: Space Angelz, if it came out when the dominant sound was NewJeans ripoffs.
[5]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The least kitschy Babymint song I’ve heard as of yet — but even without the sheer kitchen sink charisma of “Hellokittybalahcurri” this is still a joy, full of enough quirks to support most acts for an entire album cycle. Yet what impresses me about “BB Gals of the Galaxy” is how it also works well as just straight ahead synth pop, the chant-a-long vocals balancing well with an array of arrpegios that bring to mind futuristic ice cream trucks.
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: More demure (yet certainly not more mindful) than the enthusiastically unhinged “Hellokittybalahcurry³,” “BB Gals of the Galaxy” is almost disappointing for being a well-made chiptune track. What could be more indie than leaving in the false start to your verse as a signifier of authenticity? The silliness of making space-gun noises for a chorus kicks things up a pop notch, but it’s the appended and slightly warped “do do-do do do” in the hook that catches my ear: a hummed melody that seems natural enough to appear in an idol song and so tossed off that it might stick in your head as you’re weaving your way through an asteroid belt.
[6]

Ian Mathers: Yeah, it’s a bit of a shame they seemed to have backed away from the formal inventiveness, stylistic dexterity and sheer everything of “Hellokittybalahcurri³ hellokitty????,” but one suspects that kind of pace is unsustainable and this is still a very fun song, just more straightforward. (And the video still has… lots of that stuff.)
[7]

Taylor Alatorre: “Hellokittybalahcurri” was about riding the highs of a new crush through the limitlessness of digital space, and “BB Gals” extends that ride into the outer cosmos, of which the group has a more militaristic vision than I might have expected. The laser gun mouth sounds detract from the ethereal sleekness of the post-hyperpop production, which for a group like babyMINT is probably the goal. It’s a flex, sort of: “we’re so talented that the fear of being ‘boringly perfect’ is a real concern for us, so we’ll just put the names of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg in our chorus for no discernable reason.” I think they’re being used as verbs here but I’m not sure.
[7]

Melody Esme: I was willing to forgive references to Guardians of the Galaxy and The Mandalorian. I’m not much of a sci-fi fan, and I’m certainly not a Star Wars or MCU fan, but the way the words “Baby Yoda” are sung is so smooth and satisfying that it almost makes up for all the annoying memes we had to deal with five years ago. (Obviously the worst thing to happen in 2020, right?). And anyway, I love the breakbeats and the laser gun sounds and the little SOPHIE-esque touches–that little “MSMSMS” boink tube sound especially. I was gonna give it a thumbs up! But then… man, I don’t know what “Elon Musk that dude”/”Zuckerberg that dude” means. It doesn’t seem like a pro-billionaire sentiment, at the very least. Let’s see if we can pick up any context from the video. Wait… oh no, they’re forcing me to defend Zuckerberg by depicting him as a lizard person in the video, fuck! I’ll admit, I may be missing context, but even if you avoid the antisemitic/QAnon implications of “Zuckerberg that dude, lizard do do-ru,” the chorus’s lyrics still sound awful and force the image of two of the worst men alive into my brain, thereby sending me crashing back to Earth and ruining any chance of my reaching the stratosphere. And I deserve better than that. I’m not a SpaceX rocket.
[3]

Nortey Dowuona: Bread is apparently a good trading piece in negotiations with aliens. Thanks, Babymint!
[7]

Alex Clifton: Clearly we’re not meant to take this too seriously — the video indicates as much, with a “galaxy fart, fart away” and a chorus of out-of-tune recorders — but I can’t stop myself from being hung up on the line “love me up and down like I’m Baby Yoda.” Baby Yoda is not sexy! Please don’t try to make regular Yoda sexy, either! I think Babymint are trying to emphasize Baby Yoda’s cuteness, but I’m pedantic enough that this just doesn’t work for me. I think the mark of a good novelty song is that it goes down easy even when it’s being weird; you’re not meant to think too hard about what’s happening, and if there’s something jarring in there, it’s for comedic effect. By and large the song is fine, but it just misses the mark. I’m fine with laser noises but, for some reason, evoking Baby Yoda is where I draw the line.
[5]

Leah Isobel: “BB Gals of the Galaxy” toggles between naiveté and laser-focused professionalism, optimism and nihilism, love and destruction; I’d say it feels manic, but its switchbacks are precise and controlled, a constellation of every human feeling. “I’ll be your doom,” Babymint sings. To feel is to know death.
[8]

1 blerg » Thursday, January 16th, 2025 8:00 pm

Emile Simon brings us an artist whose rejected stage names include DJ Sabrina the Teenage Carpenter…

[Video]
[7.82]

Emile Simon: The opening seconds of “Anything Lost (Can Be Found Again)” announce a song of towering excesses, and its eccentric intro keeps its promises. “Anything Lost” is partly catchy dance-pop, partly busy EDM, and always zany plunderphonics. The bulk of the song is made from a Porter Robinson-esque vocal chop paired with a swift house beat, but detours abound, from acoustic drumming, breakbeat passages, and sections where Sabrina’s idiosyncratic sampling takes the spotlight. Sabrina’s contradictory impulses in terms of sampling have always been a big part of her appeal, drawing from ’90s R&B to 2000s pop all the way to YouTube vlogs, but rarely has she made it sound so expertly woven in: Ashanti and Stevie Nicks (among many others) flash up for brief seconds, before the song makes other left turns. “Anything Lost” is also an exercise in tension building: the different sections keep upping the stakes until — in typical Sabrina fashion — the song reaches its climax in its last third by introducing a pair of frenetic vocal samples that serve as the song’s definite hooks. They would be strong enough to stand on its own for the rest of the tracks, but Sabrina adds an extra batch of synths and vocals, resulting in a psychedelic triumph. It sounds like abandonment — dive deep enough in the music, and everything will be alright.
[10]

Melody Esme: Okay, it turns out the wrong way to get into her music is “trying to find time for all three-plus hours of recordings she released in 2024 right in the middle of EOY season until you’re so stressed you turn it off,” and the correct way is “listening to one eight-minute track, singled out for you, and zoning out until you forget what you’re listening to but dig it a lot and think it sounds a bit like Discovery-era Daft Punk.” If I’m lucky, I’ll make it through her back catalog by the summer, at which point she’ll drop a five-hour album and I’ll have to catch up again. I will listen to that album, though. If you have a name like DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ, I’ll follow you into any abyss. Especially if our descent is scored by dance music this uplifting.
[9]

Iain Mew: The best evocation of the sound of standing outside a party since Mondo Grosso’s “Labyrinth,” except in this case it’s more like standing in a courtyard between several different parties, blissing out as the drifting winds change the mix to and fro.
[7]

Will Adams: Pretty, euphoric, fills the same slot in my brain that old Fred Falke productions do. But as the song stretched past the five minute mark, the luster faded. Is there a 7″ edit out there, or will I have to make one myself?
[6]

Leah Isobel: Sledgehammer-subtle, drenched in three too many layers of irony, and way too long. I like it!
[7]

Katherine St. Asaph: Pop as background music. I promise that’s a compliment.
[7]

Julian Axelrod: I have a vivid memory of playing this Miguel x Cashmere Cat remix in the car with my dad, who has wide-ranging but incredibly particular musical tastes. To my surprise, he loved it. “It’s like candy,” he said with a smile. “Candy can be bad, but when it’s good it’s really good.” I wonder if my dad would fuck with DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ, who approaches dance music with the maximalist mentality of a kid in a candy store. Why settle for one drop when you can have ten? Who says a pop song can’t last twelve minutes? If you’re constantly reaching new euphoric peaks, do you ever have to come down? “Anything Lost (Can Be Found Again)” is as thrilling as any song from Sabrina’s 2024 opus Hex, but analyzing her music in a traditional single context is like reviewing only the green M&Ms from a party-size bag. Whether you’re in it for eight minutes or 90, it’s hard not to get lost in the sugar rush of synths, samples, and spoken-word interludes. This is some really fucking good candy.
[9]

Ian Mathers: This sounds great the whole time it’s on and even at a mere eight minutes and change is strangely exhausting in its formless maximalism. It feels like it’s always peaking but never going anywhere; if this came on in the club I would enjoy myself but if they put on a whole album or even a few more tracks I would be so tired, physically and emotionally. I could say this about everything I’ve heard from DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ, which means I respect the work but I’m not likely to seek it out myself.
[7]

Claire Davidson: I remember listening to Makin’ Magick a few years ago, and the emotion it inspired most in me was frustration. Yes, DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ can frequently blend together a sweet melody with a catchy vocal line, for example, but her strategy of endlessly saturating the listener with bursts of concentrated euphoria, often without a real anchor grounding her compositional sprawl, paradoxically read to me as more false than not. I’m sure she’s evolved greatly over the seven years (!) since that release, but “Anything Lost (Can Be Found Again)” has many of the same problems I initially found in her work. I do appreciate the image of golden-hour music festivals the song conjures, thanks to its wistful vocal samples, bright, spacious synths, and thumping beat that feels pulled from a decade-old EDM track. That being said, the downside of constructing a song around a kaleidoscope of fragments, all of which seem to form a background for a centerpiece that never arrives, is that there are no real dynamic shifts to make the song’s richest moments truly rewarding. Combined with the stream of platitudes that comprise the song’s few intelligible lyrics, the experience feels, at best, like the synthetic imitation of a better product—its pleasures tangible but fleeting, and all transparently engineered.
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: The greatest version of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” is not the one that appeared in Titanic or the edit that featured on Let’s Talk About Love; it’s the “Dialogue Mix,” which ramps up the emotional valence by ramming out-of-context Leo-and-Kate line readings into its swell. (“Go on, I’ll get the next one!”/”No! Not without you!”) It’s a smash-cut to the feeling; three hours of film concentrated and distilled into a few freighted words freed from the bounds of plot or character. DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ uses dialogue the same way: as great vessels of meaning that gain power by being unmoored from the identifying source details that fix them in space and time. “Anything lost can be found again,” reassures a voice — no particular voice, but a determined one — which loops and repeats itself over the burbles and stutters of cheap post-Mylo filter house. If hauntology found the uncanny in lost artefacts of the past and chillwave discovered comfort, Sabrina finds connection. The future-that-never-was might not have been lost. Maybe it’s waiting to be found.
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: Me two minutes in: a classic. masterpiece. the best thing happening in music. Me four minutes in: this is kinda going a bit long, is the song almost done? Me six minutes in: this sounds amazing, how do they do this!??! Me seven minutes in: well done DJ’s Sabrina and Salem, you two are excellent DJs. Me eight minutes in: THEF-ITSOVERWHYPUTITBACKON Me 0:00 seconds in: a classic. masterpiece. the best thing happening in music.
[10]

1 blerg » Thursday, January 16th, 2025 4:00 pm

Nikki takes us to work…

[Video]
[6.93]

Julian Axelrod: What made Wallsocket so thrilling was the way Underscores mastermind April Grey filtered vignettes about shady characters in a small town through warped versions of the pop songs playing over the PA of the local convenience store. Every hook was immediately engaging, but each one hit harder when you realized it was alluding to a guy from three songs earlier. Listening to “My Guy (Corporate Shuffle)” out of context is like watching a deleted scene months after the movie’s already left the theater. (Fittingly, the song appears on Wallsocket (Director’s Cut); you can tell a lot about an artist by how they label their deluxe albums.) On its own, the song is a sinister shuffle that churns like a pit in your stomach. But whenever it references another Underscores song like “Cops and Robbers,” it felt like grasping at the memory of a half-remembered banger from another lifetime. Then again, I’m not going to dock points for being overly ambitious. After all, Wallsocket is an album about hustling your way toward something bigger and better, even if you’ll never quite reach it.
[7]

Grace Robins-Somerville: My favorite of the Wallsocket bonus tracks. The opening verse gets stuck in my head all the time. 
[8]

Claire Davidson: The basics of the Underscores formula are sharp, even on deluxe tracks: April Harper Grey’s sarcastic sing-song lilt is wonderfully venomous, as are the insults that open the first verse. Still, the Underscores project is so ripe for subversion that I can’t help but be disappointed when things don’t go off the rails — between the act’s static-soaked sound and lyrical penchant for flirting with danger, “My Guy” promises more edge than its halfhearted earworm hook can deliver.
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Finely tuned garishness — you can see all the machinery working in real time to make this as obnoxious as possible, which should sap away the charm, but every additional layer of schtick (the vocal processing! the triple perspective! the glam rock of it all!) ends up pushing this into greatness. Genuinely an effective tourism ad for the Midwest!
[8]

Will Adams: Tips a bit too much toward the former half of the Obnoxious Banger equilibrium.
[5]

Leah Isobel: Great momentum, deeply annoying.
[4]

Katherine St. Asaph: You cannot do The Beat — “Rock and Roll Pt. 2,” “Personal Jesus,” “Disposable Teens,” etc. — in such a halfhearted, larkish way. I mean, you can, and it’ll retain some of its second/third/fourth-hand power, but ultimately it won’t work. Rachel Stevens sounded more menacing than this!
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: Schaffel pop, welcome back! It’s been a while! Underscores understands how this sound should be ostentatious and obnoxious in equal measure, and she has delivers these bon mots with devastating flair. I particular enjoy the filtered ad-libs appended to the end of each line like it’s a Jeezy verse (“What’s wrong with you?”). But something this showy should not be this vague; if the mots don’t actually amount to much, you start wondering whether they’re all that bon. What does it mean to push someone over in bed? What’s this about a robbery? Are dermatologists local? Is there enough glitz for me not to believe the answers to these questions don’t matter?
[6]

Taylor Alatorre: It’s a Class of ’09 update to Marilyn Manson’s suburban demonology, where the targets are more at once more specific (Manson never snarled about PTA meetings) and more scattershot. (Who am I meant to be angry at and why?) Underscores does a good job of making the scratches and screeches sound like an extension of her character’s deranged voice, but the self-limiting sameness of the mechanical animal stomp makes the instrumental break seem less like a wild rupture than a practical accessory. Blustery overcompensation isn’t the worst possible look here, though — she’s still singing about the upper-middle class, presumably.
[6]

Iain Mew: At most I understand about half of what is going on in the narrative this song, but the humour and punch of the needling and taunting is enough to make it work anyway. That and the energy of its constant churning crunch, the way that all of the instrumentals get sliced as they arrived. It’s the kind of song that can pull off knocking out several words with digital effects and the response vocals singing “what is wrong with you??” and it doesn’t even stand out that far. “Don’t get too comfortable” indeed.  
[8]

Alex Clifton: Billie Eilish mixed with Halsey’s girl-group impression plus a bunch of detailed lore I have zero context for, and yet this scratches an itch in my brain I didn’t know I had. Not that this is intended necessarily as a fully commentary of the state of the world these days, but it feels pretty emblematic: dark and grody, poking fun at a suburban existence, yet also with a brightness that hooks me along. I don’t know what’s happening but I’m happily along for the ride.
[7]

Ian Mathers: Sounds a bit at times like a speedier cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Capital G” interpolating bits of the Mary Wells “My Guy” and if you don’t think that sounds sick as hell I don’t know what to tell you. I tapped out on figuring out what’s going on in the lyrics when I hit the word “ARG,” but in any case it’s a lot of stompy fun to listen to.
[8]

Melody Esme: Look, I’m not certain that my experience of watching the “Infinity Guitars” video back in the early 2010s and thinking, “Damn, I wish I was as cool and hot as Alexis Krauss” is universal among Zillennial trans women. I’m just saying, it would explain why we keep making music like this.
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: CJ THE X VOICE: MOMMY
[10]

2 blergs » Thursday, January 16th, 2025 11:47 am

Ian Lefkowitz takes us back 12 years in Jukebox time…

[Video]
[5.50]

Ian Lefkowitz: Former Jukebox favorite Florrie released her debut album this year, which sounds lovely until you realize that the “former” dates back all the way to 2011. The last decade of her career has seen a lot of false starts and heartbreaks, and it’s easy to rue the missed potential, but her pop radar remains strong all these years later. Florrie’s newer songs layer her Xenomania roots with depth and wisdom, but “Looking for Love” comes from her initial set of incandescent bangers, dating back to 2012 or so. As has always been true with Florrie, her sense of rhythm and brightness let her songs gallop along the dance floor. Listening now, it almost feels like a portal to the world of Annie and Katy B and Little Boots, when dance pop hadn’t yet been fully subsumed by the Antonoff sound. And if Sophie Ellis-Bextor can do it, maybe Florrie can have a second act yet.
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: In 2010, Florrie was preparing the debut album that would be scrapped after Sony dropped her, leaving her to make EPs until she finally completed her new album, The Lost Ones. “Looking For Love” was a song on her scrapped record that, due to being reworked, was added to The Lost Ones last minute. The hook is damn near identical to the original because it was taken directly from the original. Brian Higgins, her former boss and head of longtime pop songwriting team Xenomania, handles the keyboards and programming, but the drums — simple, well mannered pop-rock loops with little bright flourishers buried under the bass, keys and synths — are played by Florrie herself, to great effect. The only problem is Florrie’s voice, which is bright and clean but bland, carrying the tune as written but unable to enliven it.
[5]

Katherine St. Asaph: Thank goodness JADE made the definitive Xenomania song of the decade, because the actual Xenomania are sounding like Ali Tamposi if she gave up on life. The track is over a decade old, so what they were trying to sound like was probably “We Found Love” — if Calvin Harris had given up on life.
[2]

Isabel Cole: Every time this song begins it triggers the irrational subconscious conviction that it is an Ellie Goulding song I vaguely remember hearing on the radio years ago, but happily the illusion dissipates once the beat kicks in. The verses, low and wistful, are lovely, and the pre-chorus builds the energy appealingly; unfortunately the chorus doesn’t feel as massive as it ought to, even though I certainly can’t quibble with any details of production. The melody sounds like it’s aiming to soar but feels too leaden to fly. Its simplicity works against it, I think, and the easy warmth in Florrie’s voice that worked so well earlier can’t carry the song through those big, long notes.
[6]

Iain Mew: The melody makes it sound a bit like One Direction’s “One Thing,” with its lairy buoyancy replaced with electronic throb. That combination gives enough momentum to carry the song, but the gleaming sound dominates to the extent that the lyrics come off as weirdly static for their dramatic subject matter.
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The melody soars, the production passes for a Body Talk b-side, but everything feels a bit like electropop Lenny Kravitz. The intentions are good, and the popcraft appreciation is there, but the execution is strangely amateurish. A bridge that rhymes “heart” with “battle scars” with an invocation that it “never rains, it pours” is unforgivable.
[4]

Melody Esme: A very good pre-chorus that, like too many very good pre-choruses, has nowhere to go, leading to an insipid nothing of a refrain that’s unable to sustain the song. (Guess what words the title is followed by? Don’t think about it too hard, she didn’t.)
[4]

Jonathan Bradley: “I Took a Little Something” was so singular in its strange lost precision that Florrie’s truncated career became self-justifying: of course a lost gem like that would be a one-of-one. The worst thing about “Looking for Love” is that it sounds too much like it should be a follow-up to that earlier song, and like many sequels, it repeats the broadest strokes but loses the texture, the oddity. The point of “Something” wasn’t that it was a sad bop; it was that it was lost and druggy while containing the anxious possibility that its lostness might endure beyond its drugginess. It’s unfair to ask why this entirely capable, synth-rain frowny-face dance song isn’t as good as one recorded 14 years ago (the hook is about “looking for love in the wrong places”; it’s a frowny-face dance song par excellence), but I also can’t hear Florrie as anything but do-call-it-a-comeback. 
[6]

Leah Isobel: Unfortunately, this nostalgia play worked on me.
[6]

Ian Mathers: The first time we covered Florrie here was over 13 years ago, and I gave “I Took a Little Something” a [10]. I still would, but I’d talk about it very differently now. (Both its jankiness and how much I love its jankiness have become more apparent to me, for one.) I’d like to thank Ian for picking this song over the 2024 version of “I Took a Little Something” on The Lost Ones, because now I don’t have to try to figure out whether I think it’s actually worse or whether I’m just reacting to the fact that it’s changed. “Looking for Love” is probably more representative of how I reacted to the album as a whole, anyway, and it’s good! It still feels like it has a bit more of a dance music pulse than a lot of otherwise similar pop, but in a more polished, put together form than 2011. Lots of people trying to make music get their plans and their dreams derailed; not many are able to stick with it (materially as much as emotionally) until they finally do. It’s hard not to be happy for her.
[8]

no blergs » Wednesday, January 15th, 2025 1:52 am

Next up, Darj introduces us to Manila’s girl group ambassadors…

[Video]
[6.70]

Jonathan Bradley: This dropped a month before “Espresso,” for those tracking 2024’s disco-froth timeline; if this sounds like a caffeinated take on Sabrina Carpenter, that’s purely down to the confidence and the zeitgeist. But “Salamin, Salamin” sounds like throwback idol-pop to me, and a mondegreen points me in the right direction. “Kailan niya ba ‘ko papansinin?” the Bini girls ask in the hook, but my anglophone ear caught “…Bubble Pop,” and I hear in this Filipina group some of the ebullient camaraderie and easy interplay of the K-pop of a decade-plus ago. There are contemporary touches too, though: I like the dexterous rapping, untouched by the self-consciousness of drilled professionalism. “Trapped in this fairytale, but I don’t want to wake up in this dream,” is a great glitter sprinkle of a bridge that leads into a tongue twister chorus. This is a girlish song about a crush, but it doesn’t shrink that feeling into diary entries and whispers. The line I heard as a HyunA allusion actually means “when will he notice me?” As soon as he opens his ears, I expect.
[8]

Melody Esme: “Forget Me Nots” slap bass combined with sweet bubblegum hooks and a fantasy/fairytale(/Satanic????) love lyric reminiscent of Little Mix’s “Black Magic.” This may be the first P-pop song I’ve ever heard, and it makes me want to explore more.
[7]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Can’t form a coherent thought about this — overwhelmed by the brightness of the bass tone.
[4]

Taylor Alatorre: Foregrounding the bass guitar in the mix is such a simple decision to make, but it earns the group some major goodwill by demonstrating that even the cutesiest of bubblegum disco-pop doesn’t have to skimp on the genre’s ancestral foundations. It also makes it easier to execute the girl group two-step of casting feminine passivity as a latent superpower – “I’m ready to be called your princess” is some seriously assertive passive voice.
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: John Michael Conchada, the writer and vocal arranger of this sweet little bop. Range: what would music be like without it? Don’t sleep on fellow arranger Paula Rose Alcasid either.
[8]

Alfred Soto: The opening synth tinkles and the slap bass evoke Carly Rae Jepsen if she had existed during the sophisti-pop circa 1987. The rest of the track follows suit.
[7]

Katherine St. Asaph: Relentless okayness.
[3]

Alex Clifton: As I’m in my 30s, I’m not the target audience for this, but I’ll always have a soft spot for bubblegum pop. There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel with a “sigh, my crush is so dreamy” song, and BINI do a nice job creating something sweet and inoffensive, yet distinctive enough to stand out from a crowd. Adding a bonus point because I love the Y2K/Lisa Frank aesthetics in the music video. Does that count as pandering? Probably, but as a millennial, I’m not used to being pandered to by younger generations, so I’ll take it.
[6]

Ian Mathers: Genuinely can’t remember the last time I heard a bassline like that — in terms of sound, in terms of what it’s playing, in terms of how essential it is to the joie de vivre — in a song like this. It works so well it makes me faintly sad it feels like such an outlier. 
[8]

Leah Isobel: The post-NewJeans girl group norm is soft austerity: twinkly, plush exteriors belying songs that with foundations of cold metal and grey concrete. Hooks are blunt and weaponized, rhythm tracks are skittering and harsh. All extraneous elements are bled out to better deliver a pop-mechanical rush. By comparison, “Salamin, Salamin,” with its thick layer of bubblegum frosting and seemingly endless length and honest-to-god double chorus, feels positively decadent. It doesn’t beg for attention but rather assumes that the audience wants to care, that its fantasy is actually aspirational. How nice!
[8]

no blergs » Wednesday, January 15th, 2025 12:43 am